Slottsskogen: Djurpark and Naturhistoriska Museet

If you’ve been following my journal entries for this Sweden trip, you’ve seen Slottsskogen referenced twice before this post, once when I walked through it to get to the botanical gardens, the Botaniska Trädgård, and once in this morning‘s post when I said I took a bit of a walk in it to get to a cafe near my first visited sight this afternoon.

In that morning post, I said there were two sights I was considering in Slottsskogen Park: a zoo, Djurpark, and a natural history museum, Naturhistoriska Museet. I said I planned to go to one, but I left you in suspense as to which one it would be.

I went to the zoo. When done with that, I looked at my watch, looked at a map, and decided the only logical option to fill in the rest of my afternoon was to also go to the Naturhistorica Museet. So, to answer the question I left hanging in this morning’s post as to whether I would get to the gallery beside Götaplatsen today, the answer is, no, I didn’t. And because I leave for my next destination in Sweden tomorrow morning, I won’t be able to get there on this trip.

Speaking of leaving tomorrow morning, you’ll find a summary of my time in Gothenburg at the end of this post.

Slottsskogen Djurpark

After I asked it, Google Translate told me that “djurpark” is Swedish for “zoo.” I’m glad it waited for me to ask. It would have totally and completely freaked me out if Google Translate popped up unbidden on my computer and, without prompting, said, “Hi, Joel. Apropos of nothing, I figured you’d want to know that djurpark is Swedish for zoo.”

I found the Slottsskogen Djurpark a bit confusing. There isn’t much directional signage to it within the much broader Slottsskogen park. I needed Apple Maps to locate it in the park.

And once there, it was hard to see how to find my way around the zoo. There was no signage that I saw directing me to the different animals.

The enclosures were, for the most part, large and enclosed by not overly substantial fences. The landscape in the pens seemed to be just Slottsskogen’s natural landscape. This makes some sense as the zoo focuses primarily on Nordic animals. So this is the animals’ country.

There were a couple of maps of the zoo in the zoo area, but I found them hard to follow. Both of the maps, at different ends of the Djurpark, were oriented the same way, and neither had a “you are here” indicator as far as I could see. (All the labels were in Swedish, and Google Translate didn’t suggest that anything said “you are here,” or a reasonable facsimile thereof.)

Because the maps were oriented the same way regardless of where they were placed, something to the right on the map wasn’t necessarily to the right on the ground.

I wandered around, inadvertently going in circles a couple of times. I saw some ponies, a couple of kinds of deer, some sheep, a couple of pigs, some goats, a couple of mottled black-and-white pigs, and a bunch of enclosures where I think the animals had gone off on vacation because the enclosures looked empty.

I read about two types of animals at the zoo that decidedly aren’t Nordic. Well, one that decidedly isn’t. I guess the other one could be, as they have a very wide range by the sea.

The definitely-not-Nordic ones are penguins, Humboldt penguins, to be precise. Their natural habitat is in South America. The animals that are possibly, but I’m not sure, Nordic are harbour seals. I wanted to see them both. I’m fond of penguins, in particular. They were one of the reasons I decided to go to the Djurpark,

Despite wandering around and around the zoo, I couldn’t find either. I looked at the posted map, and I thought I spotted where they might be, but I had trouble figuring out where they might be in real life. Doing my best to line up Apple Maps with the posted map, I found it and headed off.

The seals were probably at least a five-minute walk away in Slottsskogen from the rest of the zoo. When I got there, they were swimming around in their pool, mostly underwater, but occasionally bobbing up, and gliding with their heads above the surface for a bit before diving back down and swimming around for a long distance underwater.

As luck would have it, while I was there, a zookeeper came and fed the seals. So, that was cool. She had a wireless microphone that connected to a speaker system because it would have been silly for her to have a wireless microphone that wasn’t capable of broadcasting her words.

While she fed the seals, she told the assembled crowd about the Spanish-American War. Maybe not, but she spoke only in Swedish, so how would I know?

During the feeding, a large seagull appeared and tried (and usually failed) to steal the fish before the seals got them.

Then I tried to find the penguins. I didn’t see any signs indicating in any language where they were.

I looked in one direction along the path beside the seal pool. It looked like just a grass-and-trees park. The other direction looked more promising. There was a pond with a waterfall in that direction. But it was empty of animals apart from any native birds and other animals that happened by.

Beyond that pond was another smaller pond with a low enclosure around it. In it, there were some rare geese (I forgot to take a picture of the sign and don’t remember the type of goose). I don’t think the geese were allowed to leave. There were some ducks in the pond, but I think they were freelancing interlopers.

Beyond that pond, aha, the penguins! And lovely creatures they are.

After spending some time with the penguins, I went across the path to a cafe, where I got an ice cream. As soon as I finished the ice cream, I heard a voice over a loudspeaker at the penguin enclosure.

I walked quickly back there to, yes, see the penguins being fed. There, the zookeeper was telling people about the fermentation process for fine wines. Again, she spoke only in Swedish. So, again, I might be wrong about that.

There is also a children’s petting zoo in the Slottsskogen Djurpark. I didn’t go there. There are a lot of horribly sick and twisted people in the world. I didn’t want to risk having to see any people petting the children inappropriately. Besides, I’m an old, weak guy. And most Swedes are taller than I am. They probably would have beaten the crap out of me if I tried to stop them.

So I left Slottsskogen Djurpark. As I mentioned above, considering the time and the locations of other attractions in Gothenburg that I hadn’t seen, the only option that made sense was to visit the natural history museum, Naturhistoriska Museet. It is also in Slottsskogen, but still a fair walk away from the zoo. At least, though, it was a walk that put me slightly closer to my hotel.

Naturhistoriska Museet

The Naturhistoriska Museet in Slottsskogen is a rather amazing natural history museum. It’s mostly filled with taxidermy (or maybe realistic-looking stuffed toys; I’m not sure which).

(Apropos of nothing, why does “Naturhistoriska Museet” get two words when most of the museums I’ve seen in Sweden ram the “museet” immediately behind another word without a space between them? I know that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, according to, I think it was Emerson. But a perfectly reasonable consistency is the mark of an unfoolish mind.)

One of my guidebooks told me that the Naturhistoriska Museet has a collection that exhibits more than ten million animals. I was skeptical. Ten million? That sounds impossible.

After visiting, I’m not so sure that’s wrong.

The exhibits include everything from a giant elephant to little insects and many, many, many animals in between.

One I found interesting only because I’d never heard of it, and the description allowed me to make a pathetic dad joke is ragworms. The English description said, in part, “The ragworms are swimming predators with a nasty bite. They live in the sea where they hunt for smaller animals, mostly other worms.” Well, you know what they say. It’s a worm-eat-worm world out there.

Birds and insects probably go a long way to pushing the count up to ten million. There’s one room and a bit of another filled with display cases upon display cases containing all manner of birds in them, several birds in each display case.

In the insect room, there are a few white walls with dozens of beautiful butterflies pinned to them. And several dozen drawers can be pulled out to expose a great many butterflies under glass in them.

There is also a large beetle collection in this room, along with several other types of insects. In addition, the room contains some models, such as a several-times-larger-than-life bumblebee.

There’s a room with a skeleton of a blue whale (I don’t know if it’s an actual skeleton or a model one) hanging from the ceiling. The Naturhistoriska Museet’s star attraction is also hanging from the ceiling beside it in the same room: The preserved carcass of a blue whale, the biggest of the whales, that was beached in Askimviken, Sweden, in 1865. This room has a narrow balcony around it, so you can go up and see the blue whale and skeleton from that angle.

My guidebook tells me that at one time, visitors were permitted to climb inside the belly of the whale. The museum stopped that when a couple was found having sex in there. So, that’s something you don’t see every day. Probably not even on a porn channel.

The Naturhistoriska Museet has a whole section on evolution. It talks about DNA, pioneers in the science of evolution, the process of evolution, and comparisons of a few species. There’s one display in this section with the skeletons of a few primates, including a human. I suspect they aren’t real skeletons, but models.

One I know for sure is a model, not real. For one thing, she had unconvincing fake skin layered on the skeleton. For another, she was labelled as “Lucy,” the exceptionally famous ancient protohuman from whom some bones were found in Ethiopia. Now that I mention it, I don’t know where the Lucy bones are now, but I’m 100% they’re not covered in fake skin and sitting in the Naturhistoriska Museet in Slottsskogen park.

I was impressed by the museum having a permanent evolution exhibit.

Several years back, the Royal Ontario Museum in my hometown, Toronto, Canada, mounted a temporary Darwin exhibit. Most of the museum’s usual corporate donors refused to sponsor it because they considered evolution to be too controversial. I had never been a member of the museum before, but when I heard that, I immediately became a member of the ROM. I have kept my membership up since then, and I make a small donation to it every year.

Come on, people. I know it’s still called the “theory of evolution,” but, even if they might quibble over some of the finest of details, there’s no serious scientist alive who doesn’t believe that evolution is real. Let’s try to leave the Dark Ages behind, shall we? Scientists call stuff theories long after they recognize them as proven facts. That’s just the way scientists are. Get with the program

Harrumph. Bravo to Gothenburg’s Naturhistoriska Museet.

Slottsskogen

Slottsskogen is a huge park. The zoo and the Natural History Museum take up only a tiny part of it. And there are other attractions in it that I didn’t get to. The rest of the park is filled with forests, lawns, ponds, and small lakes. And that’s just what I saw. Even with my walks today and through it the other day to the botanical gardens, I saw only a small fraction of it.

What a tremendous asset for Gothenburg.

Gothenburg Summary

I said in my post after my first afternoon in Gothenburg that I was undecided about how I felt about Gothenburg at that point. I’ve now decided. You’ve gotta at least like or probably love Gothenburg.

Alright, that came off sounding dictatorial, didn’t it? You have a free choice in these matters. You don’t gotta, or even got to, like or love Gothenburg. But if you don’t, I want to know why.

It’s a mostly very attractive city, with lots of beautiful parks, big and small, and several public squares, big and small.

There are a few streets dedicated to pedestrians. And some other streets are what I think urban planners call “complete streets.” The sides of them are fairly generous sidewalks. Moving inward from the sidewalks to the centre of the street, there’s a bicycle track, one beside the sidewalk on each side for traffic in opposite directions. Beside the bicycle track is a lane of car traffic, sometimes with on-street parking if there’s room. The middle of the street is a dedicated right-of-way for trams, although buses often use it too.

Gothenburg seems to get it. The city recognizes that urban travel is multi-modal and all modes deserve their due.

The city also has interesting architecture, along with canals and a river.

There are sights listed in my guidebooks that I didn’t have time to see. And there are so many pleasant parts to the city that I would have enjoyed strolling around some more. Another day or two in addition to the four nights (three-and-a-half days) would have been great.